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A brief update

Hello. How are you doing? Me? I could be better. Don't get me wrong, I'm loving Zimbabwe right now, but my personal life has been, and still is, on the sucky side. I could talk about divorce and an ex wife who never quits, but I'm sure most of you would be like, move along pal nothing to see here. Its a well studied, documented and accepted social paradigm. So I wont get into that now.

Back to you. How has life been treating you? I've been receiving questions from people wanting to know how Zimbabwe's doing. This my beloved small country has been notorious for grabbing headlines in the past decade or so. Zimbabwe is doing better thank you. We still suffer from serious unresolved issues politically and otherwise, but if I were to choose the Zimbabwe pre-dollarization and the Zimbabwe now, without blinking, the Zimbabwe now is like heaven.

Even Santa came back this Christmas, and December 25 felt all Christmasy once more. We had drinks and parties and beer fests and tours by international artistes and parties and beer fests and... wait... I think I've said that already haven't I? I guess all I'm saying is we did have some fun!

It is going to take sometime before powercuts end. It will be a while until our potholes filled up and roads resurfaced. Some of our traffic lights have been fixed, but it will still take time to fix all of them. Our education system is in pain, teachers, and civil servants in general, are still getting very low remunerations, but they are back at work and we continuously hope that things will improve.

We are slowly re-learning how to budget. We still don't trust keeping money in the bank though. The trauma of past years isn't over yet, but we are learning how to operate in an environment with rules. A number of people who had left are back, and for the first time in a long time it does feel like we are moving forward.

Some of our local brands are back on the shelves, but we still have lots of imports, but that's OK, they have got fixed price stickers on their shelves, a sign that they will not change price while you are still in the queue to pay, like it used to be before. And talking about queues, they are pretty much gone. Banks have queues once a month while people make sure they take out all of their few dollars, in case they decide to do a repeat of yesteryears.

Zimbabwe is definitely healing, and I'm loving it. For the first time I can actually invite you to come visit, OK, so I'm not working right now and my income streams are limited, but if you do come, I'll buy you a couple of beers, I know a few good bars in town!
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